Science just caught up to Booker Diggins. One of the latest poster children for possible misconduct in former District Attorney Harry Connick's office has suddenly become something entirely different: A symbol of the perils of the historic disarray in the Orleans Parish criminal courthouse.

Eight years after Diggins first appealed his conviction for rape and robbery inside a Riverwalk storage room, test results of the victim's newly-located rape kit has revealed a match for his DNA, according to results filed Friday with the court.

Diggins' attorneys with the New York-based Innocence Project, who have worked for years trying to free him, are expected now to withdraw from the case.

The evidence was discovered in May, two weeks after District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office agreed to a deal that would have cut Diggins loose from prison after nearly 25 years spent serving a life sentence. His co-defendant, Charles Washington, who is serving 55 years, also sought a reversal based largely on Diggins' innocence claim.

Barry Scheck, the O.J. Simpson defense attorney who heads up the Innocence Project, secured the deal after proving that Diggins blood did not match the written blood test results from the victim's rape exam. However, because the rape kit itself was thought to be destroyed in the muck of a basement evidence room that flooded after Hurricane Katrina, no DNA test was ever done.

The blood test report, which the jury never saw, exonerated Diggins, Scheck claimed, since the results matched neither Diggins nor the victim, who said she had not had sex with her boyfriend in about three days. Someone else had to be the rapist, Scheck argued.

The only dispute, he argued, was who to blame for Diggins' constitutional rights being violated: Did prosecutors hide the report from Diggins' trial attorney, Martin Regan, or did Regan fail to present it to the jury.

"Either way, Booker Diggins is not the man who committed this aggravated rape, and that's clear," Scheck said in January.

Cannizzaro's office saw the writing on the wall and agreed to scrap Diggins' conviction, allow him to plead guilty to lesser charges and set him free. Family members expected Diggins, 47, to leave prison within hours.

But that's where it all went sideways.

Booker Diggins

District Court Judge Frank Marullo refused to endorse the deal, instead ordering a new trial for Diggins, a move that drew a rebuke and a legal appeal from the district attorney's office.

Then, in a bizarre turn, a final search requested by Cannizzaro's office turned up the rape kit in a box of evidence tucked along a back wall on a cobwebbed shelf in the courthouse attic.

A report from Cybergenetics, a firm hired by the Louisiana State Police to test the DNA, found that Diggins, who is black, is 38,000 times more likely than a random black person to be a match to evidence found on a tampon string in the rape kit.

The Innocence Project also had the evidence tested. Vanessa Potkin, an Innocence Project attorney representing Diggins, declined to reveal those results, saying Friday that Diggins wasn't yet aware of them. But Potkin did not dispute the state's findings.

"I wish the rape kit had been found years ago when we embarked on this journey. It would have saved a lot of resources. We could have gotten to the answer pretty quickly."

It turns out the rape kit wasn't very hard to find, said Robbie Keen, director of the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project, which just finished cataloguing mountains of evidence and overhauling evidence record-keeping at the courthouse.

Keen said an old log book in a warehouse listed Diggins' name and case number and showed where the box sat, probably for years. Among the evidence logged in the book: A "tan envelope containing 'rape kit' in plastic bag."

"After we found the book at the warehouse and found the case in the book, it was easy," Keen said. "We just went into that area and kind of climbed up on top of the shelf to find it. It just took a little looking."

Until now, it appears, nobody ever tried, or at least not very hard.

Former Judge Charles Elloie in 2004 denied Diggins' appeal for post-conviction relief, finding that he had missed the deadline and that his request for DNA testing wasn't necessary since he hadn't met the legal standard of "articulable doubt."

By the time the Innocence Project took on the case and filed his appeal in 2010, the rape kit was assumed to be destroyed, although Potkin said they asked for it.

"It's been a few years now that we've been told the rape kit doesn't exit," she said.

The best they could do was have Diggins' blood tested against the serology results from the victim. Diggins came up Type O, while the victim is Type B. The report shows Type A from the rape exam.

Cannizzaro's office hired a forensic expert, George Schiro, to explain how those results might not exclude Diggins as the rapist. Schiro said it was possible the Type A material came from the victim's boyfriend or was bacterial or viral, and that Diggins didn't ejaculate. Diggins' attorneys hired a half-dozen experts who scoffed at those theories.

DNA testing is far more accurate and can detect a match in a wide array of biological evidence: hair, saliva, blood, semen, skin cells.

Christopher Bowman, a spokesman for Cannizzaro's office, declined to comment on the case pending submission of the Innocence Project's test results. Bowman said Cannizzaro's office requested the rape kit from Criminal District Clerk Arthur Morrell's office "multiple times" since August 2010.

"We asked for it a lot," Bowman said. "They said they could not find it."

Morrell, the court clerk since 2006, noted that Diggins' appeal preceded his taking office. He insisted that "there was no indication the rape kit was in with the other evidence in the list of evidence in this particular box."

According to police, Diggins and Washington forced the victim, a 23-year-old assistant manager at Mike Anderson's seafood restaurant, into a storage room in a robbery allegedly set up by two restaurant employees.

The woman said she was held at gunpoint, handcuffed to a pole and gagged. Police said a piece of paper stuffed in her mouth held a partial fingerprint of Diggins. Prosecutors relied solely on the testimony of the victim, who fingered Diggins in a photographic line-up and in court.

Diggins was convicted of aggravated rape, which carries mandatory life without parole, plus 30 years for armed robbery and five years for conspiracy to commit armed robbery.

It's unclear whether he will get the new trial that Marullo ordered.

Marullo, in his May ruling, found that the two sides overstepped in agreeing to vacate the three charges and settle on a new sentence without his authority.

Cannizzaro's office called the judge's call for a new trial "highly improper." Prosecutors and Diggins' attorneys then set about to confect a new deal that would lead to Diggins' release without another trial. Those talks died when the rape kit turned up.

The appeals court put its ruling on hold pending an outcome of the DNA testing.

Karis Scott, who pleaded guilty to accessory and conspiracy charges in the case -- accused of helping set up the robbery -- insisted Friday that he was railroaded and would continue his battle to prove his innocence despite the DNA results.